Influencer Marketing: A Comprehensive Piece about Influencer Marketing and Some Case Studies

One of the most significant factors for any consumer to buy any product or hire any service is its influence on themselves. We as human beings are well aware of the word ‘influence’ since many of our daily activities are either to influence someone else or are executed due to its influence by others.

In the field of marketing and advertising, making use of this factor or say characteristic in human beings is referred to as ‘Influencer Marketing’.

Influencer Marketing

Having emerged as the most powerful form of marketing and evolving tremendously over time and with technology,influential personalities such as actors-actresses, sportspersons, motivational speakers, famous leaders, and many more find themselvesat the centre of this strategy. It is a well-proven marketing strategy, makes for a pleasurable experience for consumers and is increasingly being adopted by most brands across the world.Everywhere you look, the burgeoning growth of Influencer marketing is apparent.

Influencer Marketing is the most comprehensible marketing strategy today due to the organic nature of advertising involved. The influencer marketing strategy is mostly focussed on the fact that every potential customer is approachable with an idea or product which is endorsed or accepted by a person whom they trust or respect. Therefore, most advertisements we watch on our televisions cater to celebrities who are well known for their work in their respective fields.

An Influencer

An influencer can be understood as a person who carries an ability to impact or inspire others. An influencer on the social media would be referred to as a Social Media Influencer and would successively influence his/her followers through the social media platform (which includes various websites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest and so on).

Most influencers we watch are either celebrities from the entertainment industry or the sports industry. However, today, in this digitally growing era, amidst the growing cohort of advertisers, influencers are not limited to television/motion picture actors and actressesbut standalone You Tubers, podcasts persons, radio jockeys, video jockeys have successfully created content to seduce the target audience. This evolution in the digital world has widened the reach to consumers so much so that social media platforms are flooding with influencers who have further lead to the introduction ofa plethora of ideas to market an idea, brand or service. The power of word-of-mouth recommendations is proving to be tremendous with a high retention rate.

Influencer Marketing Agencies

Today, the world resides on the social media. If statistics are to be believed, the percentage of audience covered by social media is staggering. The digital era has created widespread business opportunities forevery influencer marketing agency. They are who oneconsults for suggestions and guidance for catering to one’s influencer marketing techniques. The management and the highly qualified staff of aninfluencer marketing agency can suggest the firms to choose the best possible influential personality for their brand, product or service.

Finding an Ideal Influencer Is Critical

This marketing strategy revolves around a chief influencer. Therefore, choosing an influencer for marketing a service, brand or product may be crucial! And with an ample number of influencers available for the social media, it would be difficult to choose! There would be three major factors which must be analysed by anyone to get the best influencer for their brand, service or product,

Reach – Reach, here, basically defines the number of followers the influencer has on various social media platforms. Higher the number of followers of aninfluencer, higher would be the impact and the reach of the business among his/her followers.

Relevance– How relevant the image of the influencer chosen is to the product or the service that he/she would be posting about! The influencer must post content relevant to the target audience for a specific reach out on social media.

Resonance –Last, but one of the most factors to analyse is the ability of the influencer to engage with the target audience. This is one of the most important and valuable characteristics to keep in mind while selecting an influencer.

Cases to Understand the Execution of Influencer Marketing

Any concept or strategy is best understood with the help of examples. In case of influencer marketing, the case studies of various brands can be studied as examples. Though there are several notable case studies to explain the influencer marketing strategy, we bring yousome remarkable campaigns strategized by influencer marketing agencies which were able to amplify their messages tenfold and consolidate massive consumers for their products.

Pedigree

Pedigree is a dog food brand. They devised a plan to market their product by standing up for a wise cause. This move of the brand came after a research done by a firm suggesting that the chances of consumers choosing a brand associated with a positive cause are high when compared to others. Therefore, pedigree came up with the campaign ‘Buy a Bag, Give a Bowl’.

The campaign aimed at providing a bowl full of food to a dog or an animal that required it with each purchase of their pedigree bag from Sam’s club.

With the campaign, they chose numerous influencers to amplify their reach to the consumers. The influencers were asked to post stories of their pets as video content, blog or social media posts. One such influencer, Kristyn Cole promoted the ‘Buy a Bag, give a Bowl’ campaign by sharing a touching story with her pet and further asked her followers to do the same.

The campaign was a staggering hit since it generated around 43 million impressions on social media platforms and increased the media value of pedigree brand by 1.3 times. The brand got huge applause from consumers and social media users with nearly 63000 content views and 9,300 engagements on blogs.

Ola Prime Time

Ola is one of the most famous Indian cab service providers. Ola prime is one of the features, under which the prime passengers of Ola would book a luxurious car for their journey. For the Ola Prime passengers, superior amenities are provided, which consists of best-rated drivers for their journey, free Wi-fi, and premium vehicles to travel in.

Ola applied influencer marketing to increase the booking rate of their cabs. Let us understand how!

Ola collaborated with various social media celebrities such as Abhish Mathew (a comedian), MilindSoman (actor and model), NarainKarthikeyan (Sportsperson) to reach out to the cab bookers and give them a memorable and satisfying ride.

With this collaboration, Ola was able to gain a sparkling response from all the Ola users. A million followers of the said celebrities associated with Ola Prime Time and became aware of the Ola initiative.

This influencer marketing helped Ola to reach out to millions of social media users through a large scale social media promotion. In addition to this, the number of users and bookings of Ola Prime also rose to a remarkable figure.

Bonobos

Bonobos is an international brand for men’s clothing. They thought for marketing their new summer 2016 collection through digital marketing on social media. The name of the campaign was relevant to their clothing #BetterthanAC, which was ideated as the clothes of Bonobos are designed and considered to keep men cool.

The influencer chosen by the brand was Foster Huntington (famous photographer and videographer). He created numerous social media posts, which displayed the bonobos clothing with the campaign name #BetterthanAC.

The campaign was a huge hit with around 68,300 engagements (which comprises of likes, comments, and shares on the influencers post).

Though the campaign was sponsored, it seemed like it was not due to a proper blending of images which the influencer usually posted. Moreover, the tone of the posts was natural and believable.